Search For the Cosmic Rosetta Stone

But do archaeologists and anthropologists have anything to teach the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where encounters are at the distance of light-years, and a round-trip exchange could take millennia?

“Absolutely!” was the resounding response at a conference held last year of the American Anthropological Association. One of the best-attended sessions of that meeting consisted of papers from leading scholars who pondered the daunting challenges of reconstructing alien civilizations – at interstellar distances.

A month earlier, in November 2004, many of the same scientists had gathered at the SETI Institute for a symposium fittingly called “In Search of a Cosmic Rosetta Stone,” a reference to the slab of basalt that provided the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics.